Bad Few Months for Climate Science
The bad news for efforts to persuade the public and policy makers that climate change is happening and is human-caused continues. Since the revelation that hackers were circulating emails from climate scientists from the University of East Anglia, two new developments promise to stoke skepticism about climate science and scientists even further. The first is news that a claim about the shrinking of Himalyan glaciers contained in the IPCC 2007 assessment is false. T...
CONTINUE READINGTime for a TREES Agreement?
The nexus between trade and the environment is huge: border tax adjustments, subsidies, eco-labelling, international technology standards, etc. etc. Little wonder, then, that many observers have called for a new international agreement to tie them together. That's complicated. But naming it is easy. The WTO treaty on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights is abbreviated as TRIPS. So it stands to reason that a similar agreement on Trade-Related Aspe...
CONTINUE READINGExtreme Events
I spent yesterday at a conference at RFF on managing "tail risks" -- the low-probability but extreme events that are on the tail of the probability distribution. Some probability distributions have what are called fat tails, meaning that the extreme events are more likely than you would expect from a normal distribution. One way of identifying such a distribution is to see what happens when records are broken. With a normal distribution, after a short initial period...
CONTINUE READINGGiving Nuclear Power a Blue Ribbon
In his State of the Union address last week, President Obama did not equivocate on the topic of nuclear power. He talked about the importance of green jobs, and then added, "But to create more of these clean energy jobs, we need more production, more efficiency, more incentives. And that means building a new generation of safe, clean nuclear power plants in this country." This was one applause line that sent hands a-clapping on both sides of the aisle. Of course,...
CONTINUE READINGWho’ll Stop the Rain?
Maybe the City of Los Angeles. I complained a couple of weeks ago that during the (rare) times when the Southland gets a downpour, all the water get sent out to sea ASAP, even though cistern technology exists that could conserve water, reduce pollution, and reduce the costs of purchasing it from elsewhere. Well, as it turns out, Paula Daniels at the Los Angeles Board of Public Works (a former environmental fellow at UCLA) has been working on the problem for a while, a...
CONTINUE READINGThe Obama Administration’s Push for High-Speed Rail
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJhM3BpBPp8] Fresh from a State of the Union Address that focused heavily on domestic economic issues, President Obama and Vice President Biden journeyed to Tampa, Florida last week to announce federal support--and $8 billion in government funding--for high speed rail projects across the country. That's a most welcome development. American train buffs who've traveled in Europe and Japan marvel at the "bullet trains" that transpor...
CONTINUE READINGChina, Energy and the Economy
The New York Times reported -- with seeming alarm -- this weekend that China is now leading the world in the manufacture of wind turbines and solar panels. Yet shouldn't we view this news as good for efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions? Action by the U.S. to reduce emissions, while absolutely necessary for geopolitical reasons and important for technology forcing, won't mean anything if China can't be persuaded to slow and ultimately reduce its exploding emiss...
CONTINUE READINGTime to make NOAA official
Cross posted at CPRBlog. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has existed since 1970, but it has never had the direct imprimatur of Congress. According to Congressional Daily, Rep. Bart Gordon (D-TN), chair of the House Committee on Science and Technology has announced that an organic act for NOAA is one of his committee's priorities for this year. NOAA authorization has been proposed many times over the past 40 years. Its time to finally get it done. Wh...
CONTINUE READINGThe California Supreme Court examines technology-based air quality emissions standards
The California Supreme Court granted review last week in a potentially important environmental case, National Paint and Coatings Association v. South Coast Air Quality Management District. The opinion of the Court of Appeal - certainly among the most colorfully-written appellate opinions I've ever read, and worth checking out for that reason alone - held that the South Coast Air Quality Management District misapplied a statutory "best available technology" standard in ...
CONTINUE READINGRiding the Energy Efficiency Wave
At the "Beyond Copenhagen Conference" at Berkeley yesterday, one of the clear messages was that energy efficiency is one of the most feasible routes forward on climate change. Energy efficiency has great interest not only to U.S. consumers, but also to countries like China that are concerned about energy security. The energy security issue is especially pressing because rising demand in Asia due to economic growth is going to push oil and natural gas prices through t...
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